“Who was she?”
“Nick was a humanities professor at various colleges all along the East Coast. Annabelle Landry had the misfortune of being enrolled in a Shakespeare class Nick taught at a college in Charleston. Her friends described her as outgoing. Always happy. Smart. Constantly giving back to the community. She was a model student.”
Ethan leaned toward me, arms resting on his knees, expression animated. It was obvious he was quite passionate about this.
“Keep in mind that Nick’s brain is wired differently from ours. While the rest of us see a kind smile as just a friendly gesture, he saw it as something more. An invitation.
“So Nick cracked open a journal and got to work writing down everything he observed about Annabelle. What she ate. What she wore. Boyfriends. Friends. Favorite TV shows. Everything.
“When he knew she wasn’t home, he broke into her apartment. Went through her drawers. Stole her underwear. Removed strands of hair from her brush. And he put it all into a keepsake box, probably in the hopes the trinkets alone would be enough to satisfy his…urges.”
“Jesus Christ,” I muttered, stomach churning in repulsion.
“As the semester wore on, Nick’s obsession with Annabelle grew. One night, he watched her while she was out at a bar with her friends for trivia night, something Nick observed her going to every week. Now, Annabelle was from a very conservative, religious family. Went on mission trips. Did volunteer work with a homebuilding organization. Stuff like that.
“Unfortunately, Annabelle wasn’t feeling well that night and left early. Her friends offered to leave with her, make sure she got home okay, but her apartment was only a few blocks away. She insisted she’d be fine. Unbeknownst to her, Nick followed her, watched as she wavered on her feet. She was so unsteady that when she finally made it into her apartment, she didn’t even bother locking the door before collapsing onto the couch. I’ll give you one guess who took advantage of that.”
“He drugged her at the bar, didn’t he?” I remarked, glancing up at Ethan. “Just so he could rape her.”
Ethan nodded. “But that’s not the worst of it.”
“It’s not?”
“In the aftermath of that night, Annabelle struggled, something Nick took great joy in as he wrote down his observations in his journal. She obviously knew something had happened. She woke up sore in places that shouldn’t have been sore. Blood in places that shouldn’t have been bleeding.”
“Did she go to the police?”
Ethan slowly shook his head. “No.”
“Why not?”
“I surmise the same reason any number of women don’t report being sexually assaulted, even if fully aware of what had happened, which Annabelle wasn’t. Rape is a crime of personal nature. Reporting it means having to relive it all over again. Not to mention, the police are sometimes in the habit of blaming the victim.”
I clenched my fists. I’d witnessed a woman being raped, and it was the worst thing I’d ever seen. I understood why most were hesitant to come forward. I didn’t like answering questions after what happened to Piper. And I wasn’t the one who was violated in such a perverse and inhumane way.
“So, instead of reporting it, Annabelle kept it to herself,” Ethan continued. “She wasn’t sure what had happened in the first place, so what was she going to do? Tell the police she might have been raped?
“Over the next several weeks, she spiraled downward. Withdrew from friends. Distanced herself from family. Unfortunately for Annabelle, Nick had a front-row seat to her transition from a once vibrant woman to a shell of a person. And being the manipulative prick he is, he decided to mess with her head even more.
“He walked into class one day and announced that he’d made a change to the syllabus. Instructed them that instead of studying Othello, they’d be squeezing in two of Shakespeare’s epic poems — Venus and Adonis, and The Rape of Lucrece.”
Ethan lifted his gaze to mine. “Do you know the story about the Rape of Lucrece? Or Lucretia?”
I slowly nodded. “Nikko, one of my good friends, has been looking into Claire’s death. She’d left a voicemail mentioning that name. After doing a bit of research, he uncovered the story about the Roman noblewoman who refused the prince’s advances, so he raped her. Since she was dishonored, she threw herself on the mercy of her husband and father, pleading for revenge, before stabbing herself.”
“That about sums it up.”
“So Nick not only raped Annabelle, he forced her to read about another woman who suffered the same fate, then killed herself.”
“Twisted, right?”
“That may be the understatement of the year.”
“Now, at this point, it didn’t appear Nick intentionally did this so she’d follow in Lucretia’s footsteps. It was more of a mind game. And he loved to play mind games. However, mere days later, news spread around campus.”
“She’d committed suicide,” I stated evenly.
“Yup. But get this… During Nick’s next class, you’d think he’d forego the lecture on The Rape of Lucrece, given the subject matter and the fact they’d just lost a classmate to suicide.”